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Colloquium Series

Once every week while school is in session, EECS invites a distinguished researcher or practitioner in a computer science or electrical and computer engineering-related field to present their ideas and/or work. Talks are generally targeted to electrical engineering and computer science graduate students. This colloquium series is free and open to everyone.

Upcoming Colloquia

Speaker Information

Jon Dodge

Ph.D. Student

School of EECS

Oregon State University

Abstract

"What should be in an explanation and what should they look like?” This is a fundamental question to answer in order for Explainable Artificial Intelligience (XAI) to gain the trust of human assessors. To this end, we conducted a pair of studies investigating generation, content, and form of explanations in the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) domain, specifically StarCraft II. First, we observed expert explainers' (shoutcasters) foraging patterns and speech, as they provide explanations in real-time. Second, we used a lab study to examine how participants investigated agent behavior in the same domain - but without the real-time constraint. By conducting this pair of studies, we are able to study both (1) explanations supplied by experts and (2) explanations demanded by assessors. Throughout our studies, we adopted an Information Foraging Theory (IFT) perspective, which allows us to generalize our results. In this talk, we present what these results tell us about how to explain AI systems.

Speaker Information

Adam Bates

Assistant Professor

Computer Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

In a provenance-aware system, mechanisms gather and report metadata that
describes the history of each data object being processed, allowing users
to understand how objects came to exist in their present state.
Excitingly, we can also use provenance to trace the actions of system
intruders, enabling smarter and faster incident response. In this talk, I
will detail our efforts to achieve trustworthy data provenance in
malicious distributed environments. These efforts have led to the design
and implementation of a provenance-aware operating systems anchored in
trusted hardware, a mechanism that leverages the confinement properties
provided by Mandatory Access Controls to perform efficient policy-based
provenance collection, and most recently an efficient distributed
provenance management framework. Using these architectures, I will
demonstrate that provenance is an invaluable tool for combating critical
security threats including data exfiltration, SQL injection, and even
binary exploitation. By addressing key security and performance
challenges, this work is paving the way for the further proliferation of
provenance capabilities.

Speaker Bio

Adam Bates is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also an Affiliate
Assistant Professor in the Electrical & Computing Engineering Department.
He received his PhD from the University of Florida, where he was advised
by Professor Kevin Butler in the study of computer systems and cyber
security, and completed multiple internships at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Adam has conducted research on a variety of security topics, including
SSL/TLS, cloud computing, USB attack vectors, financial services, and
telephony infrastructure. He is best known for his work in the area of
data provenance, particularly the construction of secure provenance-aware
systems. He received the NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative award in
2017, and served as Program Chair for the 2017 Workshop on the Theory and
Practice of Provenance (TaPP).

Pages

Directions to Oregon State and parking information The colloquium series takes place on the main Oregon State campus. The colloquium is held usually in KEC 1003, 4:00 - 4:50 pm. [map and catalog listing]. However, please be sure to check the schedule, as room changes occur with some frequency.

Speaking in the colloquium series Speaking in the EECS Colloquium series provides an excellent opportunity to meet and interact with faculty and students of the Oregon State School of EECS. Our faculty are always interested in exploring new possibilities of collaboration. If you would be interested in being invited to speak, please contact the colloquium director.

Visiting the School of EECS before or after a colloquium If you are planning on attending a colloquium, consider taking the opportunity to visit the School of EECS before or after the colloquium. To make arrangements for your visit, please contact Tina Batten via e-mail or phone (541-737-8613).

Groups attending the colloquium series If you intend to bring a substantial size group (10 people or more), please notify the colloquium director so that we can ensure that we schedule a lecture room with sufficient capacity.